Ephemeral
by nevernotalways
Summary: The face in the mirror isn't hers, mostly Sakura!Centric. SasuSaku if you really, really want it to be. Warnings inside.


**Ephemeral**

**Summary: The face in the mirror isn't hers, mostly Sakura!centric SasuSaku if you really, really want it to be.**

**Disclaimer: Don't own. In fact, I'm not even entirely sure what this is.**

**Warnings: Bulimia, but not in the context of 'I need to be skinny', mentally unbalanced Sakura, and other slightly disturbing subject matter. Kinda? I don't know. I really don't know. Character death.**

**.**

**.**

Sakura knows, she _knows_¸ the face in the mirror isn't hers.

It looks like her, though. Pink hair falling gracelessly into her eyes, skinny, still without a chest.

But it _isn't her_.

It _can't _be.

The girl in the mirror has no life in her eyes. Her face is gaunt, her skin nearly translucent. Her hair is pale and limp and greasy. She's too skinny; she can count her ribs through her tank top. Her mouth feels gross and foreign. There's vomit clinging to the tips of her hair because she didn't think to pull it back before rushing to the bathroom. The girl-who-isn't-Sakura is a wreck.

It can't be Haruno Sakura, because Haruno Sakura wouldn't be crying right now. Maybe Sakura from so many years ago would have, but not anymore. She isn't twelve years old anymore, and she knows that tears solve fuck-all when your best friends could be dead or dying.

But she can feel wetness on her cheeks, and hopes that maybe it was raining outside and she didn't notice. She feels awkward and wrong in her own skin; weak, fragile. She tries to breathe and she remembers that it used to be so much easier.

Then he came back. He came back and the weights are in place again, constricting the movement of her lungs.

The girl in the mirror can't be Haruno Sakura, except for that she is. Sakura is a stranger to herself because of him. And while she needs to be thinking _traitorscoundrelmurderer_, all she can think of is_ heneedshelp, he'smisguided, IwishIwasenoughtofixhim_.

She falls to the floor, her knees giving out. She wraps thinthinthin arms around herself and sobs. A shaking, trembling, wailing mess of _myfaultmyfaultmyfault_.

She crawls towards the toilet again and purges her stomach, and it doesn't make sense. She's a medic; she _knows _what she's doing to herself, that it won't work and that it certainly isn't helping. But all she can think of is _outoutout,_ like it's going to get rid of all the turmoil inside her.

It doesn't, but she likes to think it makes her feel a little better. If nothing else, it's another way to hate herself.

She's been hating herself a lot, lately.

.

"I hate you." Because she's been hating him a lot lately, too, just not to the same blaring degree as her own self-loathing.

He doesn't say anything.

"Is that it?"

Silence is her only answer.

"I would've thought you'd care at least a little bit. Well, if I didn't know you were a traitor. Or if you'd ever cared about anything other than revenge. As it is, I'm just telling you because you deserve to know."

He still doesn't say anything. He just looks at her with no emotion. No disdain, no hatred, certainly no sadness. Just barely enough alertness in them to let her know that he heard her, but doesn't give a shit.

"God _damnit, _I _hate _you!" She screams, eyes stinging. "Doesn't that matter?"

He doesn't say anything, and she loses it. She stalks up to him, grabs his shirt, and shakes him.

"Why can't you _care_?" She screams, but it comes out as a whisper. "_I hate you!_"

He smirks bitterly, a twitch of the lips more than anything else. That's what it looks like at least; his cell is dark. She wishes it wasn't. She wishes his room was covered in mirrors, so he could watch himself rot. She knows she doesn't actually want that, because no matter how much he doesn't, she still cares.

"_Thank you._" She says, and hopes the words sting. She knows they won't. He probably doesn't even remember saying them. "_Thank you_, for troubling yourself enough for a reaction." She says, standing up.

He just looks bored.

Haruno Sakura walks out of Uchiha Sasuke's cell and manages to turn the corner before she loses any semblance of control.

She breaks down on the stone floor of the prison where he's being kept.

It takes three hours before she's ready to be Sakura again.

.

Sakura saw it coming when he left. She got to say goodbye, something Naruto had to wait three years for. She wishes she had waited. Because Sasuke didn't know what he did to her then, that she was only twelve (and fuck, so was he. They were so young; are _still _so fucking young), and she just wasn't prepared for it.

She doesn't think she'd ever be prepared for it, actually.

She empties all her thoughts into the toilet bowl, because she hasn't put anything tangible in her stomach to get rid of.

Her throat burns and all she can taste is acid. It feels a little like poetic justice to transfer it into something sensory.

.

"You know what I think I hate more than you?"

It's become something of routine; she visits him daily, he maybe listens to her speak whatever comes to her mind, because they both know he's dying and whatever is said now is transient and inconsequential.

It's just a matter of time until the city decides if _(when) _they want his head delivered to them.

He swivels his head towards her as an indication that he heard her. He still hasn't spoken to her, which is all well and good, she doesn't need him to.

"The fact that I'm stuck with you." She tells him. She's sitting on the floor of his cell, smoking a cigarette because she can. She ashes wherever, and then flicks the cigarette in the corner because she feels like it.

"I'll never get rid of you, you know. Even if I got rid of every photo and suppressed every memory, you'd still be there." She says.

She takes off her shirt. It stings a little to know that he isn't interested in what lies beneath it. He widens his eyes: equivalent to a gasp, coming from him, and she smirks darkly. She takes his hand, unbound because there was no point to a restraint with his chakra flow cut and his body too weak to fight, and puts it on her ribcage. She moves it for him before he does it of his own volition, feeling the sharp rises where there are bones and deep indents where there aren't.

She laughs mirthlessly. "I haven't eaten in two weeks. I still vomit every day."

He looks at her, and she can't read his eyes. To be fair, she never really could.

.

When Sakura goes home that day and ends up with her knees on hard tile, the solid material pressing into old bruises, all she sees is red. Dripping out her mouth, splattering the bowl, pooling around her on the floor. She swallows and it's metallic.

It's actually kind of hilarious.

She curls in on herself, and even she can't tell if she's laughing or crying.

.

A week and two days later, she kisses him.

He doesn't move against her, because that's not him. He doesn't even show that it registered. She knows it did. She decides to answer the question she knows he won't ask.

"I figured I should do it before I die." She says. "Or before you die. It's anyone's bet as to who'll go first at this point."

It's surprisingly truthful for something she didn't even mean.

It's less shocking of a revelation than it probably should be.

.

What's stranger than all of it -being unrecognizable to herself, the companionship, the vices she ends up succumbed to-, is that not even once does anyone try to stop her.

She doesn't think it's because no one noticed.

She half thinks they did notice, and did try to stop her, and maybe she doesn't remember.

Reality's not as discernable as it should be.

The thought, strangely, doesn't worry her.

.

Sasuke goes to her funeral.

He has to bargain for it, and Tsunade is against it. But Naruto insists he goes, and when Naruto is insistent on something, it's going to happen.

No one says anything as they lower her into the ground. No one even knows what they could say.

He doesn't cry, but he feels like maybe he could.

.

"_At this rate you'll die before I do."_

_It's the only thing he ever ended up saying to her since he came back. _

_She had laughed._

"_I know. Isn't it great?"_

_He didn't really know what to say to that, so he didn't say anything at all._

.

_End._

_._

**A/N:**_  
><em>

**Seriously, what is this. It's weird. I'm considering writing a parallel fic to it that's an Audrey Kitching!Centric thing, using some similar lines, but different. Just because I hold love for broken Audrey.  
>Or broken anyone, really.<strong>

**Anyways, tell me what you think. Tell me it sucked. Tell me it was great. Whatever. **


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